शाब्दबोधमीमांसा: Sabdabodhamimamsa (An Inquiry into Indian Theories of Verbal Cognition- The Sentence and Its Significance Part-1)

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In this world, common people as well as critical thinkers utter sentences with the intention of conveying information that their listeners do not yet know but wish to know. In order to get what they want, intelligent people use language also to enquire about objects. Thus language generally known as sabda -makes human life possible. Hence the following remark by the poet Dandin: "All the three worlds would be engulfed in blinding dark-ness, unless this light called sabda had shone all around us". (Kavyadarsa 1.4).

Even Bharthari says:

"It is words that form the bases of meanings, purposes. activities and truth". (Vakyapadiya, Brahmakanda 13)

But intelligent insightful people do not wish to know or communicate to others over and over again things that they already know well. If they did so, their statements would not be worth heeding. They would not be respectable as ordinary or as reflective rational beings. Indeed, they would be dismissed as crazy.

Thus everybody admits that it is only fresh information of things hitherto unknown (to the listeners) - that figures as sentence-meanings in order to convey which communicators utter words which make up intelligible sentences.

The awareness generated by such sabda in the form of a sentence -is called "Sabdabodha", cognition of sentence-meaning or awareness of the relation (of word-meanings).

We envisage a sustained work in four parts, dealing with different aspects of such knowledge-from-words or sabdabodha.

This "Discussion about sentence and sentence-meaning" (Vakya-vakyarthavicara) is the first part of that projected four volume work entitled Sabdabodhamimamsa. Herein the validity and distinction of sabda or verbal testimony, the definition of Sabda, the nature of a sentence and the sentence-meaning, the cause of the cognition of the sentence-meaning, the process through which the cognition of the sentence-meaning arises, the primary substantive in verbal cognition, the unity and division of sentence, the auxiliary causes leading to the verbal cognition i.e. expectancy (@kanka), fitness (yogyata), proximity (@satti) and import (tatparya) - all these topics are dealt with according to the different schools of Indian thought. 1. Validity of sabda

1.1. Refutation of the alleged invalidity of sabda

The Carvaka school considers perception (pratyaksa) alone as the source of knowledge and does not admit either inference (anumana) or verbal testimony (sabda) to be so. The way to expose the fallacy in this view is as follows. Since some sentences fail to give us knowledge, the Carvaka school holds that all sentences are unfit to serve as the means of knowledge. But this assertion of the Carvaka must be itself based on an inference which could be expressed logically in the form of an argument as follows:

A sentence that is the subject of dispute is not valid; for it is a sentence; like the sentence which is noticed to be invalid.

This inferential argument, however, will not hold good if the validity of anumana and sabda as distinct from pratyaksa is not admitted. If the above inferential argument which seeks to establish that sabda is invalid, is itself invalid, then the validity of Sabda stands confirmed.